LEC2: Causes of War Flashcards
What are the three philosophies on the causation of war?
- Political
a. War is fought for political purposes, it is a legitimate instrument of state policy.
b. War is a balancing act between people, military forces and government. - Cataclysmic
a. War is a major disaster, but is a necessary evil. Radical change is necessary.
b. War is something that just happens to us.
c. Transformative event capable of changing human society.
d. Communism/fascism, al-Qaeda - Eschatological
a. War is inevitable and a necessary part of human existence. It is necessary to bring about the end of the world as we know it and bring a new world order.
Often based on teleological views of history.
What are the levels of analysis on the causes of war?
- The individual
- The state
- International
What is the critique on the levels of war?
- Do we need more levels (e.g. group level/decision making level)
- Monocausal
Lack of historical and sociopolitical context
How would the levels of war be applied to the Iraq War of 2003
Iraq War 2003 Case Study
- Individual Level
○ Some argue that the US intervention was the product of President George W. Bush’s worldviews and religious beliefs, his determination to finish the job begun by his father in the 1990–91 Gulf War, or Bush’s confidence in the correctness of his beliefs or his disregard for information running contrary to his beliefs and policy preferences.
- State Level
○ Others attribute the US decision to the nature of the American political system and society
§ US Commitment to democracy and the promotion of democracy abroad
§ The impact of 9/11 on political culture
§ The hesitancy of members of the congress to
§ and the influence of the US oil industry or perhaps of the “Israeli lobby” (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007) on US policy.
- International
○ Another set of interpretations argue that the US intervention was driven primarily by system-level threats and opportunities
§ destroy Iraq’s existing or developing weapons of mass destruction as the administration’s primary public rationale for the war.
§ the impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Americans’ perceptions of their vulnerability and on the assumed link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein
§ the aim of bringing democracy to Iraq or perhaps to the Middle East as a whole, both as an end in itself and as a means of enhancing US security by creating like-minded regimes;
The permissive conditions were created by the collapse of Soviet power and the end of the Cold War over a decade earlier.
What is the role of Geography in war?
- Geography and territorial control key reasons for war
- Mahan: Sea Power
- McKinder: Heartland / Land Power
- Criticism: overly focused on “wars of world domination
Territory
Territory is the Central Imperative according to Tunjic 1999. In which all other values depend on holding territory.
What is the role of arnaments in war?
The Military-Industrial Complex: Defense industries lobby to increase spending; Armed forces have an incentive to exaggerate threats to increase resources
- Organizational Politics: Armed forces seek to increase their size, wealth and autonomy, leading them to exaggerate the value of programs dear to their organizational essence
- Definition of Arms Race: An abnormally intense competition between two parties who are increasing or improving their armaments at a rapid pace
Military Competition: The condition that prevails when one state bases its armaments policy on the perceived capabilities of another
What is Anticipatory Arms Race?
Why do Arms Races lead to war?
- When the balance of power is perceived to be shifting within an arms race, the eventual loser will have a window of opportunity to fight under favourable circumstances
- Such windows of opportunity increase the likelihood of war
Example : WW1
What is Violent Entrepreneurship?
Violent Entrepreneurship – Intrastate Conflict
Three Factors
1. Unemployed Young Men
2. Plunderable natural resources
3. Firearms
Leads to WAR
Based on the “greed” theory of civil war put forward by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler
What is the Aggression and The Problem of Weapons (Liddell Hart 1932) about?
Some Weapons (heavy artillery and tanks) alone make it possible under modern conditions to make decisive offensive against a neighboring country
Abolish such weapons and there would be little chance of successful aggression.
If humane nature is not ready to eschew aggression on moral grounds, …it may be driven to eschew it on military grounds, if the supremacy of defensive be sealed.
What is the Civilization cause of war?
War unfolds along civilizational fault lines
Criticism:
- simplistic understanding of civilizations / racist
What is the definition of Racism?
- Discourse by which ‘race’ is constructed as an essential differential among peoples.
- During colonialism racism ensured the persistence of the perception of the ‘transparency of the (white) body as the bearer of “universal” values, and the opacity of the (black) body as a surface for the projection of such values, or an obstacle to their dissemination.’ -Timothy Bewes, 2011.
Racism is no mere prejudice, it related to power which institutionalises these assumptions and determines one’s self- understanding and the resources and opportunities available to them.
What is the role of racism in war?
Race and Racism as justification for War
- „Enmity, as understood by the Nazis, was firmly rooted in racial/biological/ecological terms.“ (Bader 2021)
What is the role of race as a world principle in war?
The european order and its others
a global racial imaginary construed the world as profoundly hierarchical; it posited that races were intrinsically incommensurable; and that they were subject to an inevitable and enduring struggle. (Bader 2019)
Alfred Mahan imagined that the twentieth century would be the century of racial conflicts
There was a persistent fear of civilizational decline amid the emergence of different races competing for limited resources.
- For Roosevelt, ‘In the West Indies and the Philippines alike we are confronted by most difficult problems. It is cowardly to shrink from solving them in the proper way; for solved they must be, if not by us, then by some stronger and more manful race’.
- The nature of global politics was ultimately a ‘struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind’. By 1905, the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine justified imperial intervention when the ‘general loosing of the ties of civilized society’ was observed and thus necessitated the exercise ‘international police power’.
- „the “clash of civilizations” [functions] as the reformulation of a racialized discourse of international politics“ (Bader 2021)
It heavily influenced the framing of the War on Terror
Should we even be searching for the cause of war?
Should we even be searching for causes of war?
Constructivism
- Ask „how is war possible?“ instead of „what causes war?“.
- Looks not at causal explanations but at the role of ideas and identities as well as how actors understand war and what narratives they put forward
- Approach is highly contextual, individualistic and appreciates contingency
- Criticism: possibly does not explain well enough why ideas matter, how these matter and which ideas matter more than others.
The dominant Western conception of causality requires that for every effect there must be a preexisting cause. It also suggests that this cause should be clear-cut, direct, and linear. But even if we grant the ultimate legitimacy of cause and effect, there is no reason why causation— especially for something so complicated as war—should not be diffuse, indirect, curvilinear, and multifaceted. (Barash & Wedel 2021)
- This is not to claim that efforts to answer the question “Why war?” are a waste of time, even though the results can sometimes be confusing, even misleading. Out of that search can come a deeper appreciation of the devastating conundrum that is war. (Barash & Wedel 2021)
“War” does not exist; there are, rather, individual wars. (Barash & Wedel 2021)
What is Thucydides trap?
Thucydides’s trap refers to the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power and when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule not an exception. (Allison, Graham 2017)
